Frank and I are at 1105 Media Group's Government Leadership Summit in Williamsburg today. The sessions so far are really informative. Frank led off the morning by moderating a panel composed of Molly O'Neill (EPA CIO), Dan Mintz (DOT CIO), Chris Rasmussen (Knowledge Management Officer @ NGA) and Vivek Kundra (DC CTO). The discussion around how Web 2.0 is driving change in government was really captivating - check out the notes we captured during the session. You'll be amazed at what's going on in these agencies! My favorite example is Vivek's stock market approach to IT portfolio management.

Fast forward to the 11:30 session - Chris Dorobek moderating Rob Carey (CIO of the Navy), Casey Coleman (GSA CIO), Heath Kern Gibson (CIO at State) and John Kamensky (IBM Center for the Business of Government) on "Getting Started: Blogs". Yep, I'm blogging while hearing a panel on blogging. Casey, the CIO of GSA just announced she'll be launching a public facing blog through usa.gov. Great news, and a welcome voice on innovation in the business of government. Her working title is "Around the Corner", but she's actively shopping for a new name, so if you have any suggestions, drop her a note.

John K. is a Fellow of the National Academy and is deeply knowledgeable on the topic of blogs. If you haven't seen the report on blogging by IBM's Center for the Business of Government, you can get it here.

Worth noting that today is Chris' anniversary - three year ago today, he started his blog, the FCW Insider. Chris often blogs about Web 2.0, though his writing covers a wide range of topics around technology in government. He is always interesting and often provocative.

Great Summit folks - congrats to the good people at 1105 for bringing it all together.

Anne Laurent has a great summary of our recent event, held with Deloitte, on the future of collaboration in government:

The Deloitte-National Academy of Public Administration conference, "Web 2.0: The Future of Government," June 3 was awash with the inevitability of transformation, the cracking through of silos and the reconnection with customer-citizens long ago pushed out of problem-solving. It sounds familiar and even quaint to those of us who've grown jaded chasing NPR and GPRA and PART. But the hardy band of reformers who still believe government is a vital vehicle for little "d" democracy, can't help but be energized by each new effort to turn the battleship.

This time, it's collaboration that's certain to fix federal failures. A breadth and depth of collaboration within government, with it and other entities and with Americans heretofore unimaginable enabled by the tools of Web 2.0: wikis, blogs, social networking and even virtual worlds. And it's hard not to be swept away in the vision of agencies harvesting the ideas and plaints of employees and citizens online and addressing them in Internet time. Hard not to be enchanted by the notion of using Google maps and real-time information feeds to really get a handle on infrastructure, or disaster planning or improved grant making. Hard not to like the idea of smart people inside and outside the halls of power sharing what they know and what they don't without the endless, enervating vetting and cleaning process that slows most real interchange to a halt still today.

As the kids say, read the whole thing.

...the GovLoop, that is! Steve Ressler, late of Young Government Leaders, has finally filled what we've always considered be an open niche: The first social networking site aimed explicitly at the federal community.

Aside from just being a pretty cool site, this is A Big Deal because it demonstrates the power of web 2.0 not only to tackle specific problems, but to bring together communities in ways that totally transcend individual agency walls. The challenges facing our nation are increasingly bigger than any one office, agency, or department. While more formal coordination wouldn't hurt, it still depends on traditional hierarchies. What GovLoop does is to go around that, and begin building the kind of informal, diverse, networked, socialized community that's going to be critical to maintaining the vitality of the federal government in the 21st century.

While it's aimed at government, anyone can sign up and join this fascinating dialogue.

A recent NextGov article written by National Academy fellow Anne Laurent discusses the potential use of games by IBM for both software development collaboration and in allowing businesses to interact with customers. (Most Companies Use Games; Shouldn't You?) Laurent also suggests that federal agencies ought to take notice of the growing usage of gaming technologies amongst most major employers.

As of yet our crack team of case study librarians have not researched any prominent usages of gaming by federal agencies, but you can add your own case study if you find an example of government gaming in a collaborative way.